


I Would Fall in Your Shadow, I Believe

by olivelily



Category: American Horror Story: Coven
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-16 23:37:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12352872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olivelily/pseuds/olivelily
Summary: Fiona and Cordelia reach a breaking point. Eventually.





	1. ( and the water was closing all around )

**Author's Note:**

> Set during episode 11, diverts from canon events thereafter. I have a pretty good idea of where this is going, but no idea how many chapters it will take. This is the first of at least three, so bear with me.
> 
> Title and chapter title credit go to Stevie Nicks, duh.

It always began the same way, even if the end result was different. Sometimes it became a blinding pain behind her eyes, a searing pang in her gut, a sharp jab between her heart and ribcage, but the sensation of her heart plummeting to the pit of her stomach was what started it.

That was what told her that something was very, very wrong with her daughter.

The first time was when Cordelia was nearly two, and managed somehow to climb the bars of her crib and topple onto the floor in the middle of the night. Fiona had awakened from a sound sleep, jolted by a sudden and inexplicable tightness in her chest; rushed out of bed and down the hall before truly realizing what she was doing or why.

There had been other occurrences over the years, though recently it had become difficult to discern what might be the usual warning from an effect of the sickness pervading her system day by day. The worst ever, possibly, was the one on Halloween—-because the pain was so acute, the pressure in her chest so startlingly intense that in the microseconds before Delia’s piercing scream echoed through the bar, Fiona was certain she was having a heart attack. 

This one was not quite so brutal, so all-consuming. In fact, she had chalked up the initial telltale sensation to nerves, and brushed off the subsequent headache as a migraine. A day without some level of discomfort was rare, anymore. But then her phone lit up, a call from Cordelia, and even when she answered she had not yet put two and two together until Myrtle Snow’s voice came over the line. _I don’t know where you are, Fiona, but come home. Hurry._

Running up the stairs left her winded, unsurprisingly, but adrenaline was pumping so hard through her wearied veins that she barely felt the shortness of breath, or even the headache pulsing steadily behind her left eye. It didn’t matter, nothing mattered, until she could see her daughter, until she could confirm what she had managed to get out of Myrtle over the phone. 

Both eyes. Gouged out. Of her own doing. 

The thought was enough to make her nauseous, and that was enough to keep her from downing the whiskey she poured out of habit, the drink she had told Myrtle she needed to steady her nerves. Two sips and she no longer wanted it, set it on the vanity counter and promptly sunk into the chair before the mirror for sudden fear of her legs giving out beneath her. She couldn’t face Delia now, she thought, and then in an almost comic twist of cruelty she realized… it didn’t matter, because Delia couldn’t _see_ her. Again. 

After the acid attack Fiona had felt some perverse sense of gratitude for the simple fact that her daughter was unable to see her obvious physical deterioration, and each time the thought crossed her mind she hated herself for allowing it. She was similarly thankful that, out of everything the Sight could possibly have shown Cordelia, Myrtle’s death was the only vision summoned—-and she did not and would not feel guilty for that particular train of thought. Selfish as it was, the last thing in the world she wanted was for Delia to see any one of the numerous visits to doctors all over the globe, or sleepless nights spent in pain, or even the impressive arsenal of prescriptions in her medicine cabinet. 

But Delia had done this awful thing to herself for that very reason. She wanted to regain the Sight, in order to… to what? _"Cordelia has your number, Slim."_ Leave it to Myrtle Snow to prey upon Fiona’s biggest, baddest fears, and to sound like a ridiculous approximation of a 1940s film noir detective while doing so. Nothing new for Myrtle, of course; the council head had been using various scare tactics against the Supreme for years now. Everything had become amplified in the past several weeks, though, and after the attempt on her life—-orchestrated by her daughter, spurred on by her rival—-Fiona had begun to feel, for lack of a better term, gaslit. That was Myrtle’s longstanding modus operandi; Fiona’s mastery of manipulation paled in comparison to that level of puppeteering. 

She would not allow it to sway her. Not now, not any longer. Steady on her feet once more, she traded her fur-lined cloak in favor of a shawl, stepped into the hall to check for any prying eyes or ears. The coast was clear; Myrtle had given up her post, but even if not, Fiona held no intentions of backing down. Still, she hesitated even with one hand upon the doorknob, other hand briefly flattening against the wall for support. The weakness was in her head, she told herself, and she could snap out of it for her daughter’s sake. 

“Auntie Myrtle?” Cordelia’s voice, soft and slightly pained, called out as soon as the knob turned even the littlest bit. 

Fiona drew in a breath that seemed shallow, and again, she told herself it was nothing. A cruel trick of her imagination, a side effect of nervousness. “It’s me, Delia.” 

She locked the door for good measure before turning her attention to the figure in the bed, shrouded by darkness. Fiona didn’t mind; there was no need to open the drapes, and the absence of any light was amenable to her headache. As she got closer, she realized Delia was not lying down but sitting up, propped against a mountain of pillows, and that her wounded eyes were wrapped with several strips of gauze wound about her head. No signs of whatever mess there had undoubtedly been, and for that Fiona was grateful. 

Delia nearly laughed, a sort of raspy scoff before she spoke, “I told her not to call you.” Evidently whatever sedation Myrtle provided had worn off. “The damage is done. You can’t fix it. You couldn’t fix it before, and you can’t fix it now.”

There was no real argument against that. Fiona stood at the foot of the bed, stopping short of coming any closer. Her hands knit together tight in absence of a cigarette or anything else to occupy them. “I never said I could.” She would have given anything to be able to do it, though. Then, or now. “Why did you—-” Her voice broke, and she tried again, “—-Why did you do it? You had your vision back, you were… you were getting better. The scarring would have faded, you—-”

“Jesus,” there was that dry laugh again, and the tone of her voice reminded Fiona all too much of herself. “That’s all you care about, isn’t it? I’m not like you, Fiona. I’m not _vain_. I’ll live this way for the rest of my life if it means this coven will be kept safe.”

The tension in her hands blossomed up into her shoulders, her neck, her mouth, jaw uncomfortably tight and she found it difficult to speak, if only because she was so goddamn angry at Myrtle Snow and her goddamn self-righteousness. If not for her influence, Fiona had no doubt Delia would never have done this. Never have chosen to sacrifice her own well-being just to prove some idiotic point. “Myrtle put you up to this, didn’t she?” She couldn’t help it; the accusation was out and there was no taking it back. “She fed you some bullshit about taking the high road, about me being a threat to you and your girls.”

“It isn’t bullshit,” Cordelia shot back, “Prove it, Fiona. Give me your hand.” She reached out, unsure of her mother’s location in the room.

“You don’t… even know if it worked.” She had hoped to be able to tell whether or not the Sight had come back; she thought she would be able to feel it, to sense the change in her daughter’s magic but the only energy she could feel was her own, pulsing at an incredibly weakened rate. 

“I need to test it out. Come on, show me I’m wrong.” 

Fiona’s breath caught in her throat, and she swallowed hard against a rising feeling of panic. It was silly; there was nothing Delia could do because she was bed-bound and blind, if Fiona wished to leave she could do so. But running away, refusing to comply would only make things worse, would only play into Myrtle’s hands and further solidify whatever Delia already had in her head. 

Two steps forward and she realized she needed to be sitting down for this as her legs felt unsteady again, as though they might give out any second. Hand on the bedpost for support, she made her way to the other side of the bed, opposite from where Delia lay, and slowly eased herself to perch on the mattress’s edge. She pulled her shawl tighter about her shoulders, though if anything she felt much too warm. 

Cordelia was surprised to feel her mother’s slight weight beside her, and for a moment she reconsidered altogether. Fiona wasn’t supposed to comply so easily; that wasn’t really part of the plan, and she withdrew her hand. Something wasn’t right. 

No. That was what Fiona wanted her to think.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” she asked instead, “Anything you want to spill before the Sight does it for you?”

Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. Fiona’s head pounded, stomach churned, and she wished she had just stayed in her room and let her nerves win out. She turned to look at her daughter, the thing she loved most in the world, the only thing she had ever really loved—-and knew that if she just came out with it, right here and now, she could save them both an immeasurable amount of pain. Her lips pressed together tight, the right words resting just behind her teeth, but they wouldn’t come. Her answer was one word, hoarse and strangled. “No.”

She bowed her head, turning away despite the fact that it didn’t matter, Delia couldn’t see the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, and placed her hand on the bed, palm-up for her daughter to take. Any thought of guarding herself against the Sight was abandoned; the effort it would take to muster the necessary magic was far too taxing, and deep down the Supreme knew it wasn’t worth another night of misery. Still, she braced herself for the impact, and was surprised when she felt nothing. Delia’s fingers were tight around her own, but there was no exchange of energy, nothing Fiona could detect on her part.

Cordelia felt it all. 

The initial flash came, a blinding flash of white across what would have been her field of vision, and she took in a quick breath as the first fragments began to come into focus. Her mother’s room, not in Paris or New York or Los Angeles but the one just down the hall. Fiona in her robe, the black and white one she’d had as long as Cordelia could remember, seemingly frozen before her vanity, hands tightly gripping the back of the chair as though that was the only thing keeping her upright. It was the only thing keeping her upright, because no sooner had she let go than she fell, hard, and not in the usual way, not in a way someone might trip or roll an ankle. Collapsed would be a better word for what Cordelia saw. Before she had time to truly process it, there was another scene: Fiona in a hotel suite, the space stark and impersonal, sitting on the side of a bed much in the same way Cordelia imagined she was sitting here with her now. Except in the vision she wasn't sitting so much as she was crumpled, head in her hands, breathing strange and painfully irregular. Again, Fiona stood and again, she fell. 

Cordelia felt her heart beginning to drop down, down, down, an unpleasant sinking feeling she had never before experienced. 

“Mother—” She began, voice shaky, but then she realized—-this wasn’t real. This couldn’t be real. Her mother was using some sort of trick to skew her visions, aiming for sympathy when Cordelia was admittedly out for blood. “Cut it out, Fiona,” she said instead, “Whatever you’re trying to pull, stop it.”

So it wasn’t working. Fiona breathed a sigh of absolute relief, and withdrew her hand. “Don’t blame me. I wasn’t doing anything—-if it didn’t work, it didn’t work on its own.” 

“No,” Cordelia leaned blindly forward, grasping at what turned out to be her mother’s wrist. Fiona’s arm felt alarmingly thin, skin and bone much more than usual. She had always been lithe but never… never like this. Stress, surely, Cordelia thought, and the fact that Fiona drank most of her meals. 

Fiona barely had time to react; this time she felt it for herself. The energy assaulted her senses in the worst way, and when her own magic naturally tried to rise up to fend it off, she forced it back down. “Delia—” Her voice rasped from her throat, an attempt at protest cut short by the pain behind her eyes, suddenly unbearably intense. She shut her eyes, trying to curb the feeling, afraid she might pass out then and there. 

Something had changed, something in her mother’s magic. The visions came faster this time, and flipped by almost too quickly for Cordelia to process them. An impossibly young, beautiful Fiona, a version of her mother Cordelia couldn’t remember on her own, holding a little girl no older than two, both of them laughing. A strange sense of nostalgia came over the headmistress as she realized that little blond girl was herself—-she had a faded, almost-gone memory of the pink-striped pajamas that child wore. Of course it would be her; Fiona had no other children, but the image was so strange, so foreign… and then the next, a memory Cordelia did have, quite vividly. Christmas in Fiona’s flat in Paris, the year she had turned eight. Fiona looked the way Cordelia remembered her best, face lit soft by twinkling lights on the tree, blond hair falling in loose waves over her shoulder as she bent down to retrieve a gift. Her hair had been longer, back then, and Cordelia admired it so. Wanted to have hair like that when she grew up. Wanted to look just like Mama. 

The scene grew dark, and the next was not nearly so pleasant. Fiona in another hotel room, the walls all muted tans and greys, head in her hands as she sobbed. _Sobbed._ Cordelia could count on one hand the number of times she had ever seen her mother cry, and that was nothing compared to this. Details faded into sharper focus and Cordelia realized this was not a hotel room, this was… a hospital. A doctor’s office. And that particular scene repeated, with the background shifting, different locales. Fiona sitting to have her blood drawn, over and over again. She wouldn’t be doing that, Cordelia knew, unless she absolutely had to. Her mother hated needles. Back to Fiona’s room in the academy—-no, the bathroom this time, Fiona becoming violently ill and appearing hardly able to scrape herself up from the tile floor afterward. She was wearing the same dress she had worn—-yesterday, Cordelia realized, and a chill shot straight up her spine. Just yesterday. This was not in the past, this was not something Fiona had dealt with and recovered from, this was not a fluke or a false memory. This was happening now.

Cordelia felt sick. She let go of her mother’s arm, and dropped back against the pillows Myrtle had so painstakingly arranged. Her heart had begun to beat double-time. The Sight left her head reeling just from the force of the magic, let alone all she had seen. All she never, ever wanted to see. 

“Mother?” Her voice was small, and incredibly meek.

Fiona barely heard her. A loud, rushing sound had begun to fill her head; it was the way she often felt just before she was going to faint. A feeling she had become familiar with since her power began to fail. With her wrist free from Delia’s grasp, she leaned forward, head dropping into her hands, eyes still squeezed shut. She could not and would not black out right now. Not here. She had brought herself back from it before, in front of Delia, more than once. She could do it again. A deep breath in, exhaled back out, repeating until the awful feeling began to ebb. Her head still hurt terribly, but that was par for the course anymore. Something had happened, she knew. Delia had… seen something. Something horrible. 

“What was it?” Fiona heard herself ask, even though she really, truly and honestly did not wish to know. “What… did you see?”

Her daughter’s silence told her everything she needed to know. 

Ever so slowly, the Supreme got to her feet, a steadying hand on the bedside table just for safety’s sake. She gathered her shawl to close around her trembling frame, and began to make her way out of the room. 

Upon hearing the retreating click of her mother’s heels, Cordelia abruptly called out to her. “Fiona—-wait.” 

Fiona did not want to wait. She wanted to get out of there, to hole up in the relative security of her own room and take enough of whatever would do the trick to sleep off this entire nightmare of a day. But she stopped dead in her tracks, though she did not turn around. 

“Nothing,” came Cordelia’s nearly inaudible voice, “I didn’t—-see anything. It was all jumbled up, like a puzzle, none of it made sense. It was nothing. I’m… I’m sorry I tested you.”

Fiona felt frozen in place, stuck as though held by some unnameable, intangible force. “No,” she simply said, voice cold but not nearly close to its usual timbre, “No, you’re not.”


	2. ( but you never told me about the fire )

When Cordelia was fourteen, she sat in Myrtle Snow’s classroom and learned, for the first time, the truth behind her mother’s coveted title. 

Fiona had always been vague about details; she was the Supreme, descended from the Salem line, and that was that. A Supreme was the most gifted witch of her generation, and to prove that she was indeed the most gifted, she had to pass several tests. Cordelia knew that her mother had been their coven’s Supreme for a long time, since before she was born. It had never occurred to her that Fiona was not serving her coven as she should, simply because she did not know any better until that day. That day when her world, already turned upside-down, tilted entirely on its axis.

Myrtle spoke of it all very casually, as though she had already said it a thousand times and would say it a thousand more. Yes, the Supreme was a witch who held immense power, but with that power came tremendous responsibility, a duty to fulfill to herself and to her coven. Passing the trials known as the Seven Wonders meant that she was fully capable of inheriting her birthright, but simply doing that did not a good Supreme make. 

Cordelia had never set foot in Miss Robichaux’s Academy before Fiona dropped her off, only three days before this fateful class. She had never even been to New Orleans. But she had been to New York City, and London, and Paris, and Barcelona, and Milan. Fiona had traveled without her, once, to some kind of meeting. A summit, Cordelia would later learn. Coven business. One time, in all of Cordelia’s fourteen years. 

So her mother wasn’t a good Supreme. Myrtle Snow didn’t say it outright (at least, not that day), but the implications were clear. Cordelia could live with that. It was maybe a little disappointing, disheartening, but Fiona had very recently disappointed her in worse ways.

And then Myrtle went on.

As the Supreme of the next generation came into her own, Myrtle said, the presently reigning Supreme would begin to feel her power declining. The rising Supreme was essentially siphoning her magic, and not only that, but her health and vitality, too. It was a painful, unpleasant and often lengthy process for the older witch. The symptoms were physical, and might show as signs of aging, but often tended to manifest as something more damaging, more detrimental. There was no helping it once it began. Some had it easier than others, but the end result was always the same. The sitting Supreme had to die before the new Supreme could assume her place. 

Cordelia sat stone-still at her desk, unable to move, unable to speak. Why should any witch want to be Supreme, she thought, if that meant enduring such a slow, agonizing death? _Why did it have to be her mother?_

She had not been so naive as to think Fiona would live forever, but it was unfathomable to imagine her succumbing to this fate. A fate she surely, certainly knew and had known for years, yet not once had she bothered to mention it to her daughter. Cordelia could not recall a single occasion when Fiona had been sick, not even with so much as a cold. She suffered migraine headaches from time to time, but that was all. To think of her one day beginning to lose her magic, and becoming physically ill as it happened… 

And then Cordelia began to panic. What if it was happening now? What if that was the reason Fiona had begun to drink so much these past couple of years? What if that was why she had sent Cordelia away? That worry spiraled further and further out of control, all while the teenager remained sitting motionless at her desk, completely deaf to whatever else Myrtle Snow was saying. The longer she thought about it, the more plausible it seemed, and when class was dismissed she practically shot out of her seat and ran upstairs to her room, never mind that the school day was not yet finished. She sat on her bed, knees drawn up to her chest, and cried for the first time since leaving California. She cried for the home she missed, the only one she had ever known; she cried for how out of place and wrong she felt here. Most of all, she cried for her mother. For Fiona’s absence now, for Fiona’s growing absence the past four years as she drank more and more, for Fiona’s absence one day in the future when she would be not only absent but simply gone.

Nearly twenty years had gone by since that day, and Cordelia had hardly thought about it in as much time. Now it permeated her psyche, along with a hundred other things that seemed to click into place like puzzle pieces. That night in the bar, before the acid attack, she had looked her mother in the eyes and asked if she could feel her power slipping away. It was a joke; she was only teasing, but Fiona’s silence was all too telling. She should have seen it in that moment. Should have seen it when Fiona first arrived, looking like she’d been to hell and back. Cordelia had asked then, too, in so many words. _Why do you look so jet-lagged?_ She couldn’t allow herself to see it, because it was impossible. Over the past two decades, throughout the deterioration of their relationship, Fiona Goode had become almost invincible in her daughter’s eyes. The Supreme was larger than life, a force to be reckoned with, untouchable and unstoppable. 

Cordelia would give anything to think of her mother that way again. 

When Myrtle returned to look in on her some time later, she realized she did not know how much time had passed since Fiona left the room. Maybe minutes, maybe hours. She did not tell Myrtle her mother had been in to see her, nor did she divulge any of her present concern. The last thing Fiona needed, Cordelia thought, was for Myrtle to know. She pretended to have been asleep, and gratefully accepted the elder witch’s offer of another sedative potion. Anything to quell her mind, to stop the visions from replaying over and over on loop. The grogginess took over almost immediately. She felt herself beginning to relax, thoughts beginning to fade in and out. Myrtle sat with her a while, making sure the potion took the desired effect, and when she rose to leave, Cordelia heard herself begin to speak.

The voice didn’t feel like her own, the words were independent of one another. “Auntie Myrtle,” spoken impossibly slow and slurred, “My mother’s dying.” It sounded so strange to say out loud that she nearly laughed. “Did you know?” 

Myrtle Snow merely patted her hand, and wished her sweet dreams.


	3. ( i'm just asking to be saved for a while )

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... the Axeman had to show up, and I apologize in advance if this chapter royally blows.

Sleep eluded the Supreme, as it often tended to do when she needed it most. Her preferred cocktail of sleeping pills and whiskey didn’t work as intended. The combination left her feeling pleasantly woozy for a while, drifting in and out of lucidity, but the feeling didn’t last nearly long enough and when it wore off, her nerves somehow felt even more shredded than before. Echoes of what Cordelia had said still rung in her mind, no matter how she tried to dismiss them, no matter how much she tried to convince herself that her daughter was telling the truth. The Sight didn’t work, the visions were nothing. 

That was bullshit, and Fiona knew it. 

She wished to look in on Cordelia one more time before taking off for the night. Once again, though, she hesitated with her hand already firmly grasping the doorknob, but this time was different. She felt suddenly, immensely and immeasurably weak, leaning on the doorframe for all the support it would give. The energy of the Sight was still tangible in that room, strong enough Fiona could feel it getting at her even through the door, through the walls. She couldn't risk going in again, even just to open the door a sliver’s worth to check on her daughter. She moved away, using the wall as anchor until the feeling ebbed, and she felt sturdy enough in her heels to navigate the formidable staircase.

Perhaps showing up at her lover’s dingy apartment at nearly two in the morning wasn’t the best course of action; it was, after all, just another form of running away from that godforsaken house, something Fiona Goode felt she had been doing for more or less her entire life. But when her taxi arrived, she got in all too eagerly and dropped her head over the back of the seat, swearing she felt better by the time the car turned off the block.

She did not knock because it was not necessary. Never was, with him. She slipped in quietly, finding that he was not asleep, nor did he seem particularly surprised to see her at such an hour. He turned down the volume on the record player and greeted her with a kiss, one she accepted but did not fully return. 

“You seem distracted,” he told her, sounding maybe a little hurt, eyes never leaving hers as he moved to drape her cloak over a chair. “What’s on your mind, baby?”

“Nothing.” The lie came easily. “I… couldn’t sleep, is all.” She turned to toss her bag onto the kitchen table, and subsequently felt his fingers begin to play on the zipper of her dress. She entertained the thought, if only for a second, then shrugged him off. “Later,” she promised, even though she hardly meant it. 

Undeterred, he settled to move her hair to one side and press his thumbs against the back of her neck, massaging gently as he could. She was more and more fragile, he realized, nearly every time he saw her. “Something’s keeping you up, then.”

“My pills didn’t work,” she countered, though she could hear the falseness in her own voice. She stepped out of her heels, one after the other, and let him guide her to sit on the side of the bed, where he knelt behind her to keep up his work on her neck and shoulders. “I think that house is going to be the death of me. The only time I ever… seem to get a decent night’s sleep is when I’m here.”

“Then stay,” he whispered against the shell of her ear, “Long as you want.” 

Fiona could feel herself beginning to relax, at long last. She bowed her head, allowing him to rub up into the nape of her neck, and breathed out smoothly and slowly for the first time in hours. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” 

“More than anything.” He worked at a particularly stubborn knot at the base of her neck, delicate as possible given the circumstances. “They’re really wearing you out over there, aren’t they?”

“Mmm… something like that.” 

“What would it take to get you to leave? All the pain it causes you, all the suffering… I’ll never understand why you stay.” 

“Because I have to.” They had been over this more than once. 

“You ran away before, baby, you could do it again. You’re good at that. Just… pack up and hit the road, don’t look back.” He slowed his massage, moving his hands down to grasp at her upper arms, pulling her to relax back against his chest. “What’s stopping you? I don’t buy ‘I have to’ anymore. You’ve never _had_ to do anything, Fiona, and you know it.”

She didn’t enjoy his habit of assuming whatever he pleased about her, and more often than not, she let him know it. “I don’t give a shit whether or not you _buy it_ ,” she hissed, turning around in his arms, matching his grasp on her with one of her own on his shoulders. “You don’t know half of what goes on in that house, or in my head. You think you have me pinned down, but you don’t. You never will.”

He tightened his already-firm grasp on her arms, serving to hold her in place as he searched her eyes, trying to get a hold on what was happening. His girl was fiery, he knew, but something far beyond that was troubling her now. “Easy,” he attempted to soothe, “I don’t want to pin you down, baby. I want you to be happy, I want you to… live out the rest of your days the way you want to, not the way those girls would drag you down.” 

“Don’t patronize me,” growled low through her teeth, “I came here to rest, not to be interrogated.” But she did not move from his grasp, did not attempt to free herself. 

“Fiona…” His gravelly voice was even lower than usual, soft as he could make it. Oh, how he worried about her. Years and years had gone by to prove that she could take care of herself but now… everything was different, and there was no clearer sign than this. She was losing control, he could tell, and he knew her well enough to know that was the worst possible thing. That was what would damage her most, that was what would send her to a grave earlier than the one already awaiting her. “You trust me, don’t you?” 

She didn’t believe she trusted anything anymore. Her heart had begun to race, adrenaline pumping for no real reason. Her breathing felt stilted as it had back at the house, and she felt too worn down to fight with him. She nodded once before leaning forward to drop her head against his chest. His arms wrapped about her tight, and she slowly moved her hands up his shoulders to clasp at the back of his neck. 

He rocked her there for a moment or two, almost as though she were a child calming down from a tantrum. She was so small and slight he swore he could feel her heart pounding as she pressed herself against him, her chest heaving with uneven breaths. She was ill, yes, he knew as much, but this was… something else. Something had spooked her, something was causing her to tremble this way. “What happened back there?” He moved back on the bed in order to draw her into his lap, certain that if he let go of his grasp around her back and waist that she would fall. “You’re shaking, Fiona,” he murmured into her hair, “I’ve never seen you worked up like this. Who—-or what’s got you so scared?”

If only it could be so easily explained. She merely shook her head, feeling the roughened fabric of his shirt against her cheek as she did so. Fear was not something the Supreme wished to acknowledge, even as it overtook her, even though it was painfully and pitifully obvious. No matter how safe she felt here, how much he could protect her… he could not protect her from the horrors waiting back at the house, he could not protect her from Cordelia’s visions or from her own self-loathing. “My daughter hurt herself,” Fiona began, words muffled into his chest until she lifted her head the slightest bit, “She… purposefully maimed herself so that she could… regain her visions. Some witches have… the gift of second sight, if they’re otherwise incapacitated. She had it before, when she was… attacked, and now she has it again. She sees things. Secrets. Things other people are hiding. She said she didn’t see anything when I went in to check on her, but… I know she did. I felt it. My magic felt it.” She dropped her head against his shoulder again, exhaling a shaky sigh. “I haven’t told her what’s happening to me. I tried, but I couldn’t… I couldn’t make myself say it. I don’t want her to know, I don’t want anyone… to know.” 

He held her closer, hand gently cupping the back of her head, and wished more than anything that he could take it all away. All of the worry, the stress, the pain that tore her apart every minute of every day. “You have too much pride, baby,” he told her, “You’re going to make it worse for yourself, and for her, the longer you keep up this act.” An act that was becoming more and more transparent as it continued. “I know it isn’t what you want—-and you’re used to getting exactly what you want. It’s hell for you, but you’ve got to let go.” 

Letting go was precisely what she was most afraid of. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.” He pressed a kiss into her hair. “Doesn’t have to be right now. Soon.”


End file.
